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Topic: The Hard Way (Read 60507 times)

"Thanks." Kate briefly gave the man a nod of acknowledgement, keeping her handgun trained on the stairwell, silently wondering whose side the barkeep was ultimately on. That he hadn't tried to chill any of them during the firefight seemed to be proof enough he was their ally, for now at least.

"Patch up, shove off, put as many miles between you, this motel, and its problems as you can by dawn." An inner voice told her, urging Kate to keep running, not get involved in the problems of these ex soldiers. "Screw it," she muttered, waiting impatiently for Bobby to return. "Might as well see this through to the end." Adding those redneck pricks and the Italian mafia to her list of people to run from would just make life more complicated. At least with Frank and Cutter she had someone to watch her back.

Across the hall. Low, to the side of the door. Sweep it open with the heel. Look with the mirror. Wait. Is the fatman on a toilet somewhere? It wouldn't surprise Frank. Getting shot at with an armor piercing SMG probably made him crap his own pants. Keep an ear open for him down the hall. Go in if it's clear.

Cutter's breathing sounded loud even in his ears. He was glad he wasn't on point, the point man tripped the trap, or took the first round. Now with cell phones, insurgents could press a button from a concealed location and take out the middle of a patrol. Now would be a good time for a grenade or two, or about four more guys with M16s or old Gibson from Mobile, the best squad assault weapon gunner he had ever met. Tough bastard and a dead shot with the choppa. Still didnt top a Republican Guard sniper.

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Stand to the side. Roundhouse kick to the door of the bathroom. Stay off line. Keep the wall between himself and the most likely line of the shotgun. Make sure he's on the same wall as the tub. Can't wait to wrap his arms around this bastards neck and squeeze.

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Kate winced at the sound of the shotgun, slightly muffled by the cheap walls. Hopefully her two allies would call out once they had the situation under control, assuming they even remembered she was down here.

Kate glanced around again, still no Bobby. The first aid kit offer was a probably a ruse for the guy to hide in the basement, or run out the back door and get as far away from here as he could. Cowardly, but smart too, so she couldn't really fault him if that was indeed the case. He was just a civvie, and had no stake in this firefights ultimate outcome.

It's go time. The motion from Frank is like the uncoiling of a beast, or perhaps a serpent. As he goes in, he skids a moment, staying up right purely by training. Even as one meaty hand rams the shotgun off line. Wrap under. Grab the slide rail. Pull. Fist to the face makes unbalancing easier. Takes the fight out of them, usually. Grab the shoulder. Rip him off the toilet. Knee to the face on the way down. Rip the shotgun the rest of the way out of an increasingly lax grip. Hook around. Sieze the upper wrist. Twist it. His knee on the side ribs, bracing, the other on the neck, trapping the arm.. Flex the elbow backwards over the knee. Frank knew the pain. It shot up the arm, all the way through the shoulder and threw the spine. Sharper than a knife.

"HOO-AH!" He had a spare arm, too. "Evening, Sweetheart. You must have really missed me - but I think we need to have a little heart to heart talk."

"Foster, right? find his wallet, see if you can find anything else interesting."

As the fat man swore at him, Frank idly leaned a hair more weight into the arm that he was holding. It wasn't going to actually do anything yet, but it was close, close enough to probably convince the Italian that Frank was in the process of tearing it off.

"Well, Sonny, I'd like to be able to do this the right way. But I don't think I really have all that much time. So, we're going to do this the easy way." He unleaned, easing the pain, then leaned again, that quarter inch of movement making a world of hurt appear. "See, sweetheart, this is a game of trust. You trust that I will hurt you, unless you tell me the truth. Not what I want to hear, but the truth. I just showed you how I can hurt you. Now, usually, the reward is that I stop hurting you. But, if you tell me the truth, I'll patch your ass up and call the cops before I leave. They'll put you in a nice little holding tank where your boss has to try really, really hard to get a hold of you, and they'll stitch you up right. And, hell, Nebraska can't be bothered to execute anyone, even if they have the penalty on the books."

Smiling in quite the friendly fashion, Frank leaned into the arm just a touch, a reminder of the pain he could inflict oh so very quickly if he chose. "Now, I'm sure you're tired of me calling you Sweetheart. What's your name? Mine's Frank."

"Hooah?" Kate wondered out loud, faintly hearing the exclamation as it echoed down the stairwell. Victory yell of the marines if she recalled correctly. That meant the situation upstairs must have resolved in her allies favor, and it was time to get involved once more.

Painfully Kate stood up and checked her leg injury, mostly clotted over and swollen shut, it should be fine for now until she could bandage it and get some antibiotic ointment on the wound. Moving cautiously she climbed up the stairs, making her way towards Frank and Cutter. "Downstairs is secure for now, that chicken s**t barkeep ran off to hide in the corn field." She explained, giving them both a nod in greeting.

"How about we call him floor mat?" Kate suggested, gesturing to the pinned fatback and holstering her sig while sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Cutter suddenly felt superfluous. That was a thing about the marines, when the firefight was over and the bodies were piled up, the marines packed their kit, stowed their guns, and they went back home.

Frank seemed to know what he was doing, better than Cutter could have come up with. His idea of interrogation was ask a question, hit the subject with the butt of a gun... There were also some creative things a fellow could do with duct tape, a plastic chair and a hand grenade. And here he was all out of duct tape.

She glanced over at cutter, noticing his hesitation, and the soft sound of blood pattering onto the carpet.

"If you have a first aid kit I can patch that up for you." Kate offered, giving him a grim look. "Or at least let me use some napkins to staunch the blood loss, unless you'd prefer to bleed out on the floor."

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

"Yeah, that would probably be a good idea, I don't know how bad I am hit," Cutter admitted. He sat down on the foot of the bed, and rolled up his sleeve, exposing the prosthetic arm. He twisted it and it came off, no time to be coy about things. He looked at the arm, it had been awfully expensive for the VA hospital, shame for it to have been messed up. He had a spare in the truck, literally with the spare tire, but it was a lot more crude. To be honest, he also had one that was just a hook on the end of a stump. Cutter was the best d**ned pirate in all of LA, or Lower Alabama as his friends and neighbors knew it.

The arm on the bed, he exposed his shoulder so that Kate could tend to it. Being shot sucked, and if more people realized that, well not so many people would need to be shot.

"See? Easy." Frank smiled, as he watched Angelo's face closely. Ninety percent of the routine was developing the tells. Learn to tell when the other guy is truthful, when he's deliberately lying, and when he just plain didn't know. It was going to be hard. He didn't dare watch Cutter and Kate at the moment. Complacency was the first step to prisoner escape.

"Now, this was a stroke of really, really bad luck for everyone involved, wouldn't you agree? Now, you had a prearranged meet. I don't know what you were moving, or who you were moving them to or from. Now, which family are they with? I'm betting your boss did tell you that much, at least. You do have to be able to identify them, after all."

"Supposeta' meet a bunch of Rollins' (it came out Rollinzez). The goods are for Mr. Ferucci, outta Vegas. We came here to push the pedal to the medal. Rollinzez are late with the stuff. I don't know what da hell the stuff is, not in my pay grade to know. We were just supposed to apply some pressure, and see the delivery through---" Angelo trails off, then suddenly erupts,--"You motha@!#$as, you killed my brother!! You bastards!"

Fat man started squirming again, spitting up blood.

Frank could detect no lies. This guy didn't seem to care about lying. Not now anyway. Seemed definitely apopleptic over his brother though.

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Tilting the bedside lamp to give better lighting, Kate carefully inspected Cutters shoulder, grabbing a fist full of napkins form her jacket pocket to press tightly against the injury from both sides. "Your artificial arm took a lot of the damage, it's bad, but nothing you'll need surgery or stitches for." She considered questioning him about what made him just open fire earlier, but decided it wasn't worth pursuing, whatever his reason it didn't much matter now, but conversation would help distract him from the pain. "By the way, I'm Kate..." She let her voice trail off as she realized telling either of these guys too much about herself could mean trouble, especially with the kind of past she had, and the problems still giving chase.

Speaking of problems, Kate hesitated slightly, before looking at Angelo and firing off a inquiry of her own. "I want to know if you're friends with Ozil Volchenko or his employers?" Better to find out now if this guy had any formal ties to her pursuers, especially given the chances one of these two would be silencing Angelo for good once they got whatever info they were after out of him.

"You motha@!#$as, you killed my brother!! You bastards!"

"Wrong," Kate said coldly, giving him an icy stare. "I killed him, before he could paint the wall with Franks brains." Get this thug angry enough, and maybe he'd let something slip about Ozil, if he knew anything at all.

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Kate bit back her initial reply, seeing little point in antagonizing the blubbering sleaze any further. She looked up at Frank, her voice still cold, beginning to crawl with frigid anger as she remembered what men similar to this one had done to ruin her life and burn nearly everything she cared about.

"If we let him go he'll be out for vengeance and his boss will send more like him to make an example out of us, save face with the rest of his syndicate and competitors. Not the kind of complications we want. Right now the people he represents don't even know we exist, best to keep it that way."

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Kate flinched at the sudden explosion of noise, finding she had drawn her pistol and nearly jammed it in the fat mans ear before she got herself under control. "You both seem to have your hands full." She raised her voice over the echo of the cell phone as it reverberated through the bathroom again, and readjusted her handgun to press painfully against the mans temple.

"When we answer the call, if you say one word we don't tell you to, it'll be your last." Leaning over into the tub she withdrew the cell phone with her free hand, checking the caller I.D for information before proceeding any further.

For a moment, Frank struggled to hold onto the fatman, at least not without completely cranking his arm off. Hold tight, Frank. Most effective punishment available? Backhand to the groin with his left hand. A little risky, but only if Angelo has a lot more jujitsu training than it feels like it has. Don't flinch from the phone surprise. Blink at the girl jamming her gun into his temple.

The observation had to be made. "Not good." All-the-Way frowned, considering his options. If fatman wasn't quite so fat, slipping to the rear naked choke would have been easy enough, but as it was, this close, his leverage was lacking. s**t. Right thing would have been to cuff the bastard. As it was, all he could do was maintain the hold against the struggling Italian. Hope the man wasn't dumb enough to snap his own arm on the leverage that was Frank's knee.

Ah, how I have come to love that sense of accomplishment and victory that I get when I pull the wool over the eyes of a clever player character. What DM Triumphs have you had?

Some of mine:1. Finally killing an incredibly powerful, lucky, annoying player's character.2. Finally achieving a TPK (Total Party Kill)3. Finally achieving a TPK using only traps4. Finally working out how to make it so that d**n wizard doesn't steal the spotlight all the d**n time.

Anonymous caller, no matter she had a pretty good idea who would be on the other end already, Angelo's employer. Seeing little point in making Mr. limpy struggle to answer the phone Kate thumbed the answer button and greeted the unknown with the same icy tone she used to inform Angelo of who to blame for his brothers death. "Yes?"

Cutter pulled his sleeve back down after he put his arm back on. Tonight was what they called in the corps a FUBAR.

*****

USMC Hospital, Psychological Evaluations

I want you to tell me what happened?, her voice was artfully measured, each word carefully nuanced and sculpted. Kind of like her legs, wrapped in white stockings. Not pantyhose but honest to god stockings. There had been a glimpse of the garter strap.

"Not really," Cutter had said.

You know that isn't going to be an acceptable answer, she said in a voice that would melt ice cream.

"I know," he had said.

Shall we instead go to the irregularities in your paper work?

"Everything looked right to me,"

Well, how about we begin with your name, John Foster. I see you are still writing your name as Cutter.

"It fits better," he had said. John Foster was a lucky kid who thought joining the marines would be fun. Like playing Medal of Honor, seriously the military had better stuff than any of those video games. You didn't start out with a pistol, or 20 year out of date rifle. John Foster had played football, a moderately good wide receiver, and had a beautiful fiance. John Foster lost his arm, d**n near his life, almost his entire platoon, then his fiance and even alienated his family. s**t liked to happen to John Foster. But Lt. Cutter was a cool guy who liked beer, working on engines, and shooting guns. Lt. Cutter was someone people didn't want to mess with. He had a bad ass exterior and a morbid sense of humor.

John Foster had nightmares, and sometimes had moments where he had to breathe really hard and try to force his mind back to Alabama. AL-A-BAM-A, not Al Abama. It wasn't the desert, it wasn't the war. It wasn't the death and the horror and all the things that his mind kept wrapped up and hidden except when he was asleep, or when he was placed under duress.

Why do you think that name is a better fit? she asked. Instead of letting the flow of words out, he shrugged, he always shrugged.

Well, next irregularity on your paperwork is Race, it seems you have listed yourself as 'Cyborg' I am not familiar with that ethnic grouping.

"Cybernetic Organism," he had said, explaining the concept of the man machine hybrid. There was a computer chip in the arm, a thing for ID purposes, so technically he was a cyborg. *better a cyborg than a cripple*

The exam had continued, going over the basics, her words picking at his defences. She was the third psychologist he had been shuffled around to. She was the only one he would talk to. The first had been a joke, take these pills and everything will be fine. Two days later he still hadn't slept and was intimately familiar with what gun oil tasted like.

Rebecca had left him then, unable to deal with his issues, with his missing arm.

The second doctor had been little better. He was a balding older man with ghosts in his eyes. It was only a few weeks after seeing Cutter for the first time that Dr. Schwartz himself was being medicated and under psyche therapy.

Two come aparts and an incident with a gun and his family wouldn't have anything to do with him any more. Its an ugly day when your mother asks you to move out because she is scared of you. Still, according to the shrinks and staff on base, he was doing very well. He hadn't assaulted anyone, he hadn't attempted to kill anyone, and he could function in a broken fashion around people. There were guys coming back who killed their wives then sat on their front porch for a week before blowing their own brains out.

Amazing, the only thing people saw on TV was those images of smart bombs hitting targets in silent black and white, and the phosphorescent glow of night time firefights through night vision. When they did see the veterans, they were shown the dubious Gulf War Syndrome activists, not the guys who had snapped. That was Vietnam, not Iraq.

You seem to have stress atavisms, being in stressful or perceived dangerous situations does seem to have a strong ability to induce hallucinatory episodes, she had said. Her perfume was incredible, he never asked her what it was. Perhaps that was part of the mystery that drove him mad with curiosity.

There are a variety of methods we can deal with this, you have had an adverse reaction to medication.

I would like you to start practicing meditation, controlled breathing and take up a very low key hobby

"How low key?"

How about starting with something you find unstimulating. Gardening, or bird watching, she had suggested. He had squirmed on the couch, acting uncomfortable, he had really just been trying to look up her dress. Avoidance is also a tactic deployed by someone who didnt want to deal with a situation.